Word.ws English Dictionary

carve-up

carve-up noun: the act or instance of dishonestly prearranging the result of a competition.

Noun

carve-up (plural carve-ups)

  1. (informal) The act or instance of dishonestly prearranging the result of a competition.
  2. (slang) The distribution of something, as of money or booty.
    • In the colonial carve-up that followed, lines were drawn between the port cities of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam and the island of Zanzibar.2012, The Economist, The Swahili coast: Contagion of discontent
    • "RMT will not sit back while this carve-up of the rail network is cooked up in company boardrooms. [...]".2021 September 8, “RMT on "war footing" in response to workforce cutback threats”, in RAIL, number 939, page 15

Forms of carve-up

pluralcarve-ups

Questions about carve-up

What does carve-up mean?
Carve-up means the act or instance of dishonestly prearranging the result of a competition.
What part of speech is carve-up?
Carve-up is a noun.
What is the plural of carve-up?
The plural of carve-up is carve-ups.

Words near carve-up in the dictionary

  1. carve
  2. carve out
  3. carve up
  4. carve-out
  5. carve-outs
  6. carve-up
  7. carve-ups
  8. carveability
  9. carveable
  10. carved
  11. carved in stone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: carve-up (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “carve-up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/carve-up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.